A national symbol may be any object, sign, or emblem that carries additional meaning and represents a cultural or political nation. It is a basic element of national identification and communication, and of national action. The meanings of national symbols may evolve and be replaced, being invoked, or indeed constructed, in their political, social, and cultural application. As a rule, they are closely associated with the real or invented tradition of the “imagined order” of the nation, or are at least related to it...
It's a question of personality - but also society:
Let’s talk about identity—the pieces of ourselves that tell us who we are and what we like and the pieces of ourselves that others use to decide who they think we are and what we are actually like. There are basically two types of identities that we possess: a personal identity and our social identity.
Personal identities
Let’s focus first on personal identities. Take a few moments and think about who you are and your personal traits. Personal identity is about how you see yourself as “different” from those around you. Hobbies, education, interests, personality traits, and so on. Favorite foods, the roles you hold—“I’m the oldest in my family.” These are the things that make you unique from other people.
We might dislike a quality of one of our friends, perhaps, but that might not keep us from enjoying their company and valuing the friendship. For instance, If someone doesn’t like piano music, and you’re a pianist, they might not ever care to hear you play, but they may look beyond that one trait to appreciate you as a whole person.
Social identities
Social identities are the identities that you share with similar group members. They tell how you are like others—they connote similarity rather than difference. Our social identities, though, are the categories that create entities such as “ingroups” and “outgroups,” those “us” versus “them” groups.
These include categories such as social class, race, gender identity, political affinity, and of course, religion and sexual orientation. Not only does falling into a specific category give you a feeling of “belongingness” and “community,” but it also sets up the possibility of being seen as “one of those,” which can lead to a sense of internalized stigmatization or shame for openly claiming membership in a particular group.
In April 2015, after a long and very public career, first as a male decathlete, then as a reality TV star, Caitlyn Jenner announced to the world she was a trans woman. Asked about her sexuality, Jenner explained that she had always been heterosexual, and indeed she had fathered six children in three marriages. She understood, though, that many people were confused about the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity, and so she said: “Let’s go with ‘asexual’ for now.”
Isn’t it up to her? What could be more personal than the question of who she is – what she is? Isn’t your identity, as people often say, “your truth”? The question is straightforward; the answer is anything but. And that’s because a seismic fault line runs through contemporary talk of identity, regularly issuing tremors and quakes. Your identity is meant to be the truth of who you are. But what’s the truth about identity?
We have seen a resurgence in English nationalism - and interest in England's patron saint:
One of the usual objections raised to considerations of English nationalism – and there are many – is that it doesn’t really exist and therefore shouldn’t be considered. However, understanding nationalism in general can help shed light on English nationalism in particular. One important element is the shift from nationhood to nationalism. A sense of belonging to a particular nation need not be politicised (nationhood), but it can become so if it is linked to a feeling of grievance, and has committed political actors to promote solutions to the perceived problem (nationalism). On St George's Day: English nationalism between Brexit and Covid-19 - UK in a changing Europe
Interestingly, St George is not just an English saint:
People across the world are celebrating Saint George, who has become a symbol of English nationalism in the UK - which is ironic, given that he wasn't even English... The irony of those clamouring for #Brexit festooning their homes with flags of a saint who was Greek or possibly Palestinian, with a Syrian mum, who grew up in Turkey and almost certainly had never even heard of England, let alone had anything to do with it. 5 reasons why St George would have hated the current state of England | indy100
But 'England and St George' have become very mixed up:
Ignore the scaremongering, the only people who have ever ‘cancelled’ St George are English Protestants
Nationalist mythology is what we make of it – but culture warriors could start by learning our own history
King Edward VI, a priggish 13-year-old who enjoyed putting down the adult men around him, was not a fan of Saint George the dragon slayer. For Edward of England, his nation’s patron saint was a bit of an embarrassment: a relic of the Catholic superstition that the hardline Protestants who had controlled his education had raised him to purge from his new kingdom. Why, he reportedly demanded of an elder courtier, did we honour a warrior who couldn’t even fight at close-quarters with his enemy? If English images of St George always showed him decorously poking the dragon with an absurdly long spear, “what was he doing with his sword the whole time?” ...
So if it were up to Edward VI, we now wouldn’t be celebrating St George’s Day at all. Just as Oliver Cromwell’s Parliament tried to ban Christmas. But political fashions change, and shortly after his premature death, Edward’s ultra-Catholic half-sister, Mary I, brought back St George and his full associations with England’s highest honour, the Garter.
I thought of Edward VI when I read the latest confected row about St George’s Day and our frothing contemporary culture wars. The Telegraph has claimed that Magdalen College, Oxford has jettisoned St George to honour Muslim sensitivities. The story alleged that this venerable Oxford college – which should be a bastion of all things Christian – has cancelled an “annual” dinner in honour of St George so that on 23 April, its hall can instead celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of Ramadan. The problem is, like most stories designed to complain about minorities taking up space, it isn’t as presented. Magdalen’s records show no tradition of an annual feast of St George – among revolving experiments with various themed dinners, it has held a dinner for St George’s Day only five times in the past 100 years.
The real implication of the Telegraph’s story, of course, is that here in England a celebration of St George’s Day should take priority over any minority festival. It would do better to make that case honestly, rather than relying on tortuous misrepresentation. Beneath the framing of this story, with its suggestion of a Muslim population forcing out a Christian warrior, lies the rhetoric of a “clash of civilisations”. This is a call to arms against creeping invasion, drawing on symbolism as ancient as the earliest Islamic-Christian conflict in Europe.
Come 23 April, and Twitter will again be awash with self-righteous types pointing out that “St George was Turkish”, and “appropriated” by England. To which – firstly, he’s mythical; secondly, the legacy of a mediaeval Christendom in which English Christians felt shared identity with a figure from the Middle East is one which should perhaps convince “anti-racists” on the left to treat our medieval heritage with more nuance. Perhaps the West hasn’t always been as wickedly racist as they claim? (For centuries, in-group/out-group dynamics in Europe were religious rather than race-based.)
But the only people who have ever “cancelled” St George are English Protestants. Nationalist mythology is what we make of it – but culture warriors could start by learning our own history.
No One Cares About St George's Day Because No One Cares About England
National pride is dying out. Here's why.
DISCLAIMER: This article was written by a Welsh person.
England is a sad little country. Sure, it's made some remarkable contributions to pop culture in its time, and the landscape is occasionally capable of moistening the eyes of even the most emotionally-repressed dad. But by and large, it's crap. There seems to be very little understanding among its people of the extent to which it is seen by its neighbouring kingdoms as the Gary Barlow of the group – the one with the most inflated ego, yet the least justification for it.
For a long time now, England has been suffering from a mass Napoleon complex: an entire country jacked up on invading half the countries on Earth was rightly forced to return them, and has been attempting to overcompensate for its perceived shortcomings ever since by, quite simply, being a massive bellend.
Here's an excellent start, which is highly recommended by many - with a message about what learning languages is all about:
Many years ago, we built this website to encourage friendship and understanding between people all over the world... We encourage everyone to continue acting with kindness towards each another.
If you Google “political correctness,” this is the definition you’ll get: “conformity to prevailing liberal or radical opinion, in particular by carefully avoiding forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.”
But this definition doesn’t cover its negative connotations. Many people interpret political correctness as the idea of having to carefully consider every word they say – or write – for fear of being criticized if they make a mistake. This is a complex discussion that we won’t get into here, but suffice it to say that trying to write in a sensitive way is not quite the same thing as promoting political correctness – at least in the second sense.
When we talk about sensitivity, our goal is not to establish strict rules for writers to follow or punish anyone for nonconformity; it’s to help us all think critically about our own writing and its effects on the people who read it. What we’re promoting is respect for our audience, and the recognition that their perspectives may be different from our own.
Empathy + Flexibility = Sensitivity
In this article we’ve provided some basic guidelines for how to write about various topics in a sensitive way. But we recognize that they aren’t all hard-and-fast rules, and the “right” way to write something often depends on the context of each situation. This is why it’s so important to evaluate everything on a case-by-case basis.
If you’re ever in doubt about how you should represent a certain individual or group, the best thing to do is seek out their perspective. How do they prefer to be portrayed? What words and ideas do they find offensive? Not all members of a given group will agree on these things, but you can always try to find a consensus or a recommendation from a trustworthy source.
It’s true that this level of consideration and critical thinking requires extra work, but it’s worth it. And the truth is that there isn’t actually any other option. Every choice we make in our content will reflect a certain position; there’s no such thing as truly neutral language.
This is why we have to choose our words carefully, and make sure that we’re communicating positive ideas and values rather than potentially harmful ones. Ultimately, prioritizing sensitivity, respect, and empathy is in everyone’s best interest – no matter the context.
1491: Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought.
With a little more here:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. It was the 2006 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine. The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought. The author notes that, according to these findings, two of the first six independent centers of civilization arose in the Americas: the first, Norte Chico or Caral-Supe, in present-day northern Peru; and that of Formative-era Mesoamerica in what is now southern Mexico.
1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus is a crash-course in First Nations history that should be taught and broadcast in Canadian schools. I took history all through high school and didn’t learn anything close to what was revealed to me in the first hour of this new series. 1491 boasts 20 dramatic scenes and an Indigenous cast that provide context and blows away long-held theories that prior to European contact, Indigenous peoples were largely nomadic, did not alter the natural landscape and were not as advanced as other civilizations in the world at the time.APTN’s 1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus is must-see TV | TV, eh?
Here's another theory which blows away a few theories:
The ‘Age of Reason’ was an age of debate. The Enlightenment was rooted in conversation; it took place largely in cafés and salons. Many classic Enlightenment texts took the form of dialogues; most cultivated an easy, transparent, conversational style clearly inspired by the salon. (It was the Germans, back then, who tended to write in the obscure style for which French intellectuals have since become famous.) Appeal to ‘reason’ was above all a style of argument. The ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – took the form they did in the course of just such a long series of debates and conversations. All we’re going to suggest here is that those conversations stretched back further than Enlightenment historians assume. Forget ‘Liberté’ – 17th-Century Indigenous Americans Knew a Lot More About Freedom Than Their French Colonisers | Novara Media
Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users Gamification - Wikipedia
Adrian Hon, a game designer and author of a new book called You've Been Played, explores the increasingly uneasy ways in which game-like elements permeate our digital age. In his book, Hon charts the similarities between games and contemporary conspiracy theories – and much more. Game-like elements, he argues, underpin countless aspects of our lives today, from the mechanics of the workplace to how we spend our leisure time. You may consider yourself immune to conspiratorial manipulations. But, as the title of Hon's book suggests, you are most assuredly being played elsewhere. And – contrary to the fantasies of QAnon's would-be freedom fighters – there's no easy way to take back control.
Jolyon Jenkins looks at how the techniques of gaming have been co-opted to coerce, cajole and control us, using our inherently playful nature to make us act in ways that may not be in our own best interests. Welcome to gamification. Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. Businesses, governments and schools use games and gamification as tools for profit and control. Amazon workers pack boxes while a virtual car races across their screen. The faster they pack, the faster the car - and if they beat their co-workers, they rise to the top of the leaderboard. Truck drivers are measured for compliance with company driving standards, and can see in real time how they are performing against colleagues. But is any of this actually fun? And who said work was supposed to be fun anyway?
